20 years after the move, Pat Dye and Ray Perkins still don't see eye-to-eye

Auburn fans celebrate the Tigers' 30-20 win over Alabama in the first Iron Bowl played at Jordan-Hare Stadium in 1989. (The Birmingham News / Steve Barnette)Pat Dye and Ray Perkins stared across Legion Field at each other for four years and couldn’t see eye to eye.

Dye was the head coach and athletics director at Auburn. Perkins wore the same hats at Alabama. Together, their differences helped turn the Iron Bowl into a battle of iron wills on and off the field.

Their biggest disagreement?

Where to play the game.

Pat Dye was determined to get Alabama to play in Auburn. (The Birmingham News / Mark Almond)No one wanted to move the game out of its traditional home at Legion Field in Birmingham more than Dye, the Auburn coach from 1981 through 1992.

No one wanted it to stay put more than Perkins, the Alabama coach from 1983 through 1986. In the end, in a way, each man got his way.

Perkins vowed that he would never take an Alabama football team to Auburn, and he never did.

He left Alabama to become the head coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers before it happened.

"I knew it was going to happen sooner or later because our president, Joab Thomas, wanted it to move," Perkins said this week. "He informed me of that. But it would not have moved while I was there."

Dye swore that Auburn alone would decide where Auburn would play its home games, all of its home games, and Auburn did.

"I don’t think there was anything logistically that was in the way of us moving the game," he said Monday.

Alabama was the last SEC opponent to set foot in Jordan-Hare Stadium. On Dec. 2, 1989, Alabama played at Auburn for the first time. Then and now, Dye called it "the most emotional day in Auburn history."

On the 20th anniversary of that historic occasion, as the Crimson Tide and Tigers get set to meet Friday for the 10th time in Auburn, the two old rivals are at it again.

Where once Dye and Perkins couldn’t agree on where to play, now they can’t come to terms on the wisdom or the meaning of the move.

Perkins remains the most vocal critic of the relocation.

"I knew, if it came to moving the game out of Birmingham, it would destroy the game in some way, and I think it has," Perkins said. "I don’t think anyone wants to admit it, but I think it has."

Moving the game has destroyed the game?

Strong words.

"This is just (like) an LSU game or an Ole Miss game," Perkins said. "Well, it’s a little more than that. I’m not gonna be foolish about it. It’s still more than a game, but I don’t think it’s near the game it used to be."

For one reason, the stakes aren’t quite as high as in the past.

Ray Perkins refused to take his Alabama teams to Auburn and believes the game lost luster when the ticket split changed from 50-50. (The Birmingham News)When Auburn beat Alabama 30-20 in the 1989 Iron Bowl, it earned the Tigers a share of their third straight SEC title with Alabama and Tennessee.

Even if Alabama beats Auburn on Friday, the Crimson Tide still has to play Florida a week from Saturday in the SEC Championship Game.

But the thing Perkins misses most is a stadium that’s split somewhere close to down the middle between Alabama and Auburn fans.

"I thought that was the most beautiful thing on game day, when you could look on one side of the stadium and see all crimson, and you could look on the other side of the stadium and see all blue and orange," he said.

"That’s the prettiest sight that I’ve ever seen at a college football game."

Don’t get Dye started on the alleged 50-50 Iron Bowl ticket split at Legion Field. He’ll point out that it wasn’t a 50-50 split because the majority of the 5,000 or so Legion Field certificate holders, who got some of the best seats in the house, were Alabama fans.

"It was never a 50-50 ticket split," Dye said. "You talking to Alabama people (who say that), not Auburn people. You can cancel that right now. And Alabama played all their big games there."

One of Auburn’s arguments for moving the Iron Bowl was that Legion Field was Alabama’s home-away-from-home long after Auburn moved all of its home games but one to campus.

After 1978, Auburn played just one game a year in Birmingham, the Alabama game. Through 2001, Alabama played at least two games a year at Legion Field, including the school’s biggest rivalry games.

The Alabama-Tennessee game didn’t move to Tuscaloosa until 1999. The Alabama-Auburn game didn’t move there, for the first time since the 1948 renewal, until 2000.

Perkins has an unusual ally in his argument that moving the Iron Bowl out of Birmingham has changed the game.

David Housel has been called the quintessential Auburn man. He’s been a part of the rivalry as everything from an Auburn student to the Auburn athletics director.

He thinks Perkins and others have a point.

"I think they’re right in the sense that the game atmosphere has lost something," Housel said. "They’re 100 percent right.

"In the old Legion Field days, every play was a big play. Every snap, one side or the other was up cheering. It has lost that game-day intensity, but I think overall the rivalry has benefited from going home and home."

A blue fog

Auburn people of a certain age will tell you that Alabama walked into the most intense game-day atmosphere in Jordan-Hare Stadium history on Dec. 2, 1989.

Until then, Auburn players had walked three or four across down the street from their Sewell Hall athletic dorm to the stadium on game days. That day, the crush of the crowd forced them to walk single file, and the raw emotion caused at least one player to hyperventilate by the time he reached the locker room.

Inside the stadium, Auburn had handed out blue-and-orange shakers in the bleachers.

"They were shaking those (darn) shakers so hard," Dye remembered, "it was like a blue smoke, a blue fog, rising up out of the stadium."

Auburn rose up and beat undefeated and second-ranked Alabama that day, but Housel recalled that the final score wasn’t as important as the final figurative brick in the Auburn football program. While they were still on the job, Dye and Housel both had actual bricks in their offices as mementos. The bricks included a plaque that contained the date, the score, the place and the title: "The Final Brick."

"Unless you were there, unless you were an Auburn fan prior to 1989, you can’t understand what it meant to have this game come to campus in 1989," Housel said.

"It meant that future generations never had to experience being forced to play their home games where they didn’t want to play them. It meant never being forced to play a home game in a city and a stadium that was overwhelmingly in favor of your opponent.

"Coach Dye compared it to the Berlin Wall coming down. He got made fun of for saying that, but that’s exactly what it was to Auburn people."

Emotion aside, one of the overlooked reasons for moving the game was money. Auburn and Alabama both had expanded their stadiums to rival and then exceed Legion Field in seating capacity.

Auburn had a priority ticket program called the Greater Auburn Fund. It’s now Tigers Unlimited. Alabama wanted to start a similar program called Tide Pride in the late 1980s.

The key to the program for both schools was having the Iron Bowl to sell as part of their season ticket packages. That meant ending the approximate 50-50 ticket split, which the schools agreed to do in 1987 regardless of the game’s location.

"I look at what the game has done for both institutions from a fund-raising standpoint," Dye said. "Both schools have benefited from the game being moved."

Auburn, for example, has sold more than 75,000 season tickets in each of the past 16 seasons.

The school spent more than $30 million to renovate and refurbish Jordan-Hare Stadium in 2006, including the addition of the SEC’s first high-definition video display board.

Alabama expanded Bryant-Denny Stadium in 2006 by enclosing the north end zone, making its seating capacity larger than Jordan-Hare’s. An $80 million expansion of the south end zone has begun, and when it’s finished, Bryant-Denny will seat more than 101,000 fans.

That will make Alabama’s home field the fourth-largest on-campus stadium in the country.

"Alabama wasn’t going to come to Auburn and play in a better stadium than they had in Tuscaloosa," he said. "It’s helped Alabama just as much as it’s helped Auburn.

"They had to take it to Tuscaloosa. I knew that early on. There was no question in my mind. Once we took it to Auburn, Alabama was going to have to take it to Tuscaloosa, which is exactly what they did."

If moving the game has helped Auburn and Alabama, it’s hurt Birmingham.

"What has it done for Birmingham?" Housel said. "Birmingham has lost its luster as the football capital of the South. As long as they had that game, they had something to hang their hat on."

The last Iron Bowl here was in 1998. Alabama played its last home game here against South Florida to open the 2003 season. Structural problems forced the city to remove the upper deck, reducing its capacity to 72,000.

As part of the original deal to move the Iron Bowl to Auburn in 1989, Auburn agreed to play one final "home" game in the series at Legion Field in 1991. The Tigers haven’t returned since.

"The thing that I was conscious of was that I knew it would be a blow to Birmingham," Dye said. "That’s the reason that I came back up and played the 1991 game there. We didn’t have to do that.

"It was just to put a little salve on the wound we created when we moved the game."

Perkins knows there’s no coming back to Birmingham, but he has an idea that he thinks will restore some of what he believes is the Iron Bowl’s lost luster.

Split the tickets 50-50.

Let half the crowd in Jordan-Hare Stadium be Alabama fans and half the crowd in Bryant-Denny Stadium be Auburn fans.

"I think it could be done," Perkins said. "I don’t see any problem in doing it. There are people at each school that’ll throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘Oh, that’ll cause all kinds of problems.’ They’ll be the people that don’t want to try to make it the great, great game it could be.

"There would be no other two schools in the entire country (doing it) like that."

Dye countered, "I think it needs to be just exactly like it is. The reason is this: Auburn people are going to sell out their season tickets every year because they can get Alabama tickets when they come to Auburn. Alabama’s going to do the same thing because they can get Auburn tickets when they come to Tuscaloosa.

"If they don’t buy them a year, they lose their priority. So they’re gonna keep that priority just because of that one football game."

One thing is clear.

Twenty years after it moved to Auburn, 23 years after Dye and Perkins last coached against each other in it, the Iron Bowl remains a priority for them.

And a point of contention.

If Perkins or anyone else thinks the game isn’t as big as it used to be, Dye said, "that’s a figment of their imagination."